Tea Leaves

While there are many German words that I know, the one that I think is most apropos here is schadenfreude.

Auf wiedersehen, liebchen.

There are two universal rules about people who work in software:

1. Inexperience breeds an unrealistic optimism towards the power of new tools.

2. To offset (1), experience breeds an unrealistic hatred of all tools.

We have seen this cycle play out over and over again in the design, implementation and adoption of instruction sets (remember when those still mattered?), programming languages, operating systems, and end user applications. Back when I was younger and more optimistic about the power of new tools, I used to tinker a lot with scripting languages of various kinds. Over about ten years or so what this experience taught me was very valuable in my later career. The main lesson was this: pick one, learn it, and then stop paying attention. The one I picked to use most at the time was perl. Since then, perl has become a popular punching bag for newer and shinier scripting tools, but I have stuck to my guns. I know perl, therefore there is no reason to learn another scripting language.

My cat just gnawed through the wire to my Wii sensor bar.

Good thing you can find replacement sensor bars everywhere! Oh wait. YOU CAN’T.

Edit: It looks like I can order a replacement sensor bar from Nintendo for $10, or pay $20 at a local Gamestop for a battery-powered one with no wire. Guess which one I’ll be doing.

In the past few weeks the Tivo appears to have exhausted the current stock of Good Eats shows that are in heavy rotation. Rather than three or four a night, we are down to just a few per week. My original impressions of the show still stand, but I have one relatively minor complaint. He really doesn’t know anything about rice.

This is a favorite that started out as an accident in graduate school. Obtain 2 full snapper filets. The best way to do this is to go to a good store and have them filet a whole snapper for you. In Pittsburgh, this means you should go to the Penn Avenue Fish Company in the strip, because no other store in Pittsburgh is even half as good. When you get the fish home you will note that it is in two filets, each about 4 or 5 inches long. The pieces have a V-shaped indentation on one end. Use a knife to cut along that indentation to get two or three pieces out of each filet. Go for pieces of uniform thickness.

Now we’re going to bread the fish and fry it.

I typically avoid making political posts because, first, they tend to be boring, and second, they violate Peterb’s First Law of Human Nature, which, expressed concisely, is:

“You can never tell anyone anything.”

Lately, however, it has become impossible to turn a corner in Pennsylvania without hearing people discuss politics, and in particular the politics of personality that surround Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. I think that these discussions are emblematic of a particular failure of the Democratic party, and will be the proximate cause of their close-but-no-cigar heartbreaking loss to John McCain in November. Since I’d rather not live under another 8 years of Republican misrule, I’m going to violate my own no-politics guideline and spend a few minutes talking to the world at large, and hope that it makes some small, hopefully positive, difference.

Seriously, everyone, your little April Fools’ Day fake news articles aren’t funny and you’re killing me. Let this holiday die. Please. I beg of you.

A couple of weeks ago, after reviewing RiffTrax and its cousin project, Cinematic Titanic, I had the happy opportunity to speak with Mike Nelson, the face of RiffTrax. In particular, I was most interested in talking to Mike about some of the business model issues I raised in that earlier article. He graciously agreed to discuss them.

You started RiffTrax in 2006. How long did it — let me just ask this very bluntly. Is it a living?

It is, yeah.

And how long did it take to become self-sustaining?

It’s interesting that you ask that, because it’s a topic that…I want to be careful about this. I think there’s a point where people think “If someone else is making money, they’re doing something wrong or they’re exploiting me” and we are not to that point, believe me. It is a living. But I also try to insulate myself from the financial part of it, and that’s why I teamed with a going company to create it.

I’m probably the only food dork who hasn’t been watching Alton Brown for the last 9 years or so. He became a fixture on the Food Network just about the time that I felt that I had learned everything I needed to learn, for the moment, about the whole food and cooking hobby. So it wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago when we were filling the Tivo at random while the flu rampaged through the house that I happened to watch Good Eats for the first time.

And I like it. It’s not so much the content or the recipes themselves I like. After all, he has at least one show where he tells me that brown rice tastes good (bah!). No. What I like is the visual and narrative style. Narrative style in a cooking show? Well, yeah.

I’ve returned from my sojourn across half of the nation. Along the way, there were plenty of adventures: the Priceline reservation that turned out to be in a crack den, the fabulous KC barbecue, delicious and hard-to-get booze, and, of course, the disaster that ended in my being stranded in Indianapolis for an extra day. All of that will be written about in good time, once I’ve collected my thoughts.

But for today, I’d just like to share one discovery that has nothing to do with the trip other than it was an album I bought to keep me company: Richard Thompson’s 1000 Years of Popular Music